Mentor Blogs

Hi there One of the largest groups of users within Valor MSS Process Preparation for SMT programming is those supporting ASM, formerly Siemens, pick and place machines. ASM has released their OIB interface as a single API for both programming and monitoring for external applications to use. This has the benefit for third party applications to have an open interface that can be programmed to consistently … Read More

process, programming, data preparation, ASM, SIPLACE, OIB, vPlan, mixed vendor

Hi there Test Engineers are typically given the requirement to get 100% of nets probed at electrical test with the thinking that this delivers 100% testability. Unfortunately 100% accessibility is not the same as 100% testability. There are a number of reasons why this is not the case but here is a easy one. Typical boards contain integrated circuit (IC) components and power supplies. These power supplies … Read More

programming, data preparation, Design For Test, ICT, testability, Flying Probe

Hi there When providing accurate Design For Test (DFT) feedback to board designers, individual targets are usually inaccessible for a number of reasons. However, most DFT products only report the first reason a target is inaccessible. So this limited feedback is provided to the designer who corrects that single problem, only to find that when the analysis is run again on the new layout another reason … Read More

data preparation, Flying Probe, programming, ICT, Design For Test, vPlan

Dear all It has been a few months but this week I am out at the Mentor Graphics office in Yavne, Israel. I have been working with the R&D team out here on the upcoming versions of our Process Engineering solutions. I certainly appreciate people taking the time to respond to my blog last week on stencil apertures. The new area ratio report as discussed in last week’s blog will be part of the … Read More

VPL, BOM, programming, stencil, AOI, data preparation, Planning, Design For Test, Enhancement, documentation, Flying Probe, vPlan

We have recently received a number of requests from customers to add the Valor DFA capability to their existing process engineering solutions which were not Valor products. We now have a way to enable the addition of the Valor DFA solution that will work in conjunction with your existing SMT Programming or Documentation Creation solutions. This enables the fast adoption of DFA analysis capability without … Read More

programming, data preparation, documentation

A lot of engineers take advantage of the software capability that is delivered with the various types of assembly, test and inspection equipment. However, there is a false economy here as these software applications are optimized for that machine, meaning they typically have very good support for programming the machine but do a less than ideal job of handling the challenges of different CAD/CAM/BOM … Read More

bill of materials, AOI, Flying Probe, programming, ICT, BOM, data preparation

The AOI inspection library names are an important part of AOI programming as the reuse of these inspection templates can speed up the debug programming time, which can in turn improve line utilization time. Within Valor MSS Process Preparation the Master Part Library can store custom attributes that provide the ability to map each part number to an inspection template name. This could be a single attribute … Read More

data preparation, AOI, programming, test, inspection, optical